Any Thackerayan could have completed the plot of Denis Duval except indeed that a really sympathetic Thackerayan might have had some doubt as to whether there was any plot to complete. But to Dickens it was permitted to die at a dramatic moment and to leave a dramatic mystery. But any one can see in Denis Duval the qualities of the later work of Thackeray the increasing discursiveness, the increasing retrospective poetry, which had been in part the charm and in part the failure of Philip and The Virginians. That great novelist, for instance, with whom Dickens is constantly compared, died also in the middle of Denis Duval.

This is what separates the case in question from any parallel cases of novelists cut off in the act of creation. He never had but one thoroughly good plot to tell and that he has only told in heaven. The only one of Dickens's novels which he did not finish was the only one that really needed finishing. It seems rather like the last taunt of some elf, leaving the world, that it should be this story which is not ended, this story which is only a story. Something more seems hinted at in the cutting short of Edwin Drood by Dickens than the mere cutting short of a good novel by a great man. The Pickwick Papers showed how much Dickens could make out of other people's suggestions The Mystery of Edwin Drood shows how very little other people can make out of Dickens's suggestions.ĭickens was meant by Heaven to be the great melodramatist so that even his literary end was melodramatic. Edwin Drood, the last book, was a book designed by Dickens, but ultimately filled up by others. Pickwick was a work partly designed by others, but ultimately filled up by Dickens.

Edwin drood the mystery of edwin drood